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UPDATE: 1/6/05 - Fixed image link. I told you I was knackered.

Night Night Luke

I wish I could do it and not be prosecuted, that is. Nights like tonight.

PS: If you haven’t seen the extremely excellent Perry Bible Fellowship strips, you are missing out badly, and for that, people laugh at you. This must be one of the funniest things I’ve seen since I worked in the abbatoir in Finglas.

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designinggardensHR.jpg (JPEG Image, 750×441 pixels)

This thing is what Microsoft is sponsoring at the Chelsea Flower Show this year. It’s a “garden workspace pod” that you’re meant to sit in and get some work done. I take it that the designers don’t have two boys that like kicking a football around. You may as well paint a target on the thing and be done with it. The fact that it rotates around 360 degrees would also add to the hilarity…

Between that and the racket when the standard summer downpours come, or the heat on the rare hot days, I can’t see how you’d get any work done. Maybe it’s apt that Microsoft are shelling out for it.

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I thought I was doing better than this….

create your own visited country map

Seems like I’ve only managed to visit 9% on the world’s countries. Must do better…

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I had a play with some Linux based tools such as Ethereal and Mplayer and managed to grab this (small) video of Reg Keys’ speech from the BBC news web site. I might feel guilty, but seeing as I’m a fullly paid up licence owner in the UK, such feelings are moot. Feel free to download it if you’re a UK licence payer too, but not otherwise (it’s only ~550kb) Apologies for the sheer smallness of the window, that’s the only size the the BBC offer - all the ‘double size’ window give you is the same video with the same quality but enlarged. The promise of broadband is still yet to be fulfilled.

Download Reg Keys speech

It appears to kill my version of RealPlayer (Version 10 for Linux), but plays nicely in mplayer and on a Windows 2000 PC using an older Windows Media Player. If you need it converted to something more accessible for your setup, drop me a line.

Now we wait for the BBC Cease and Desist letter
For the record, I used Ethereal to watch the interaction between my PC and the BBC when playing the video in the standard window and found this…

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk:554/news/media/avdb/news_web/video/9012da68000c428/nb/09012da68000c50b_nb_16×9.rm
?title=”BBC”&author=”"&copyright=”(C)%20British%20Broadcasting%20Corporation”/streamid=0

Then I took the URL above and downloaded it with this command,

mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk:554/news/media/avdb/news_web/video/9012da68000c428/nb/09012da68000c50b_nb_16×9.rm

So just drop out the Copyright stuff from the URL, trim it back to the .rm and save the whole incoming stream to an out.rm file. Rename it and you’re in business.

Thanks to Thomer for the mplayer command line.

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They’re always up for a laugh at the Newbury Comedy Festival, even if the subject matter is a bit close to the bone.

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